CONVERSATION AND THE BRAIN

A great conversation is one of the most satisfying pleasures in life. Some of the best in my recent memory include: the history of marriage and how love was only recently considered a necessary prerequisite to the endeavor--with Jamie (a reporter heard this conversation and wrote a piece for NPR about the subject) both compromise and tolerance are necessary in living with someone, you gotta know when to use each--mom can we ever completely grasp how big our universe is--with Wayne Hooked into these riveting chats, our brain actually works ahead of the banter, anticipating words that are said by the other person before they even come out of their mouth. I must have previewed the words star or milky way or black hole before my friend Wayne had even said them. The experience is the same as having actually heard them, according to a recent study by Jos van Berkum at the Max Plank Institute. Van Berkum shows anticipatory brain waves look identical to brain waves of actually experiencing a spoken word. The brain also consolidates personality traits into stereotypes to speed up understanding in conversation flow. Knowing my friend Jamie very well, if she had said, "I can't wait to get married," instead of, "Im just looking for a good traveling partner right now," i would literally have had a tougher time getting what she was saying. It would have been shocking. If our brain is always jumping ahead, making judgments and assumptions....is that why great points in conversation are truly revolutionary--they give us new information, perspective, and actually surprise the hell out of us?